[WBEL-devel] Brown Paper Bag event

[Charles Lacour]

On Thursday 18 December 2003 04:21, John Morris wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Charles Lacour wrote:
> > I started to say something a couple of days ago, to the effect that I'd
> > like there to be an rc3, rc4, rchowever-many-it-takes until there are no
> > bugs in it at all. Then you don't copy or rebuild, you rename.
>
> I proposed exactly that in the runup to RC2, but have discovered it
> doesn't work.  whitebox-release and up2date have to be revved to point to
> the proper packages and if you change anything you have to rebuild comps
> and rpmdb-whitebox.  And there goes a simple rename.

I see two alternatives:

1) Build it with the name you intend to use as the final version, and just 
rename the ISO images to let people know it's not the final.

That has at least one obvious drawback - you can't tell which one you have 
installed. If that's the only serious problem with it, I think it would be 
worth consideration.

2) Automate the build process, where you have a tree of source files and 
config files for the build process, and you pass a name to the master script.

It would take several iterations to get all the bugs worked out of the 
process, but one advantage would be that you could use make so that you only 
had to rebuild the SRPMS that had changed.

This probably is the better answer in the long run. 

I'm willing to work on the script. I have one question about it, though.

Is there anything we could substitute for a full build of an SRPM? If I could 
just copy actual RPM files, later substituting the appropriate rpm command, 
then writing and debugging the script wouldn't take long at all. If I really 
and truly have to compile each one (because of special conditions that mean 
it is not a no-brainer to compile and store a whole bunch of SRPMS), it will 
take quite a bit longer, simply because each test cycle is a lot longer.

My first thought is a copy that goes and gets the (binary) RPM from some 
special location, and writes it to the ordinary RPM location.

If you have criteria such as which RPM should go on which CD, special options 
for certain packages, etc, please let me know. If you have such but don't 
have time to go into them, just drop a note saying what special conditions 
I'll need to take into account, so I can semi-account for them in the script.